PHILADELPHIA—Lincoln Financial Field is home to the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles and has recently undergone a $125 million renovation. This included a complete renovation of the video control room and the implementation of the Evertz DreamCatcher live video replay system.
The Philadelphia Eagles Evertz installation We made the decision to go with DreamCatcher after following the product’s development and evolution in the two years prior to our renovation. What sealed the deal for us were the system’s advanced features, including the ability to network multiple DreamCatchers over a 10 Gig infrastructure, and the built-in Evertz router control, keyframing and playlist capabilities.
MULTIPLE SYSTEMS COVER ALL THE ACTION
We use DreamCatcher as our exclusive replay system for our in-house broadcast of Philadelphia Eagles games, as well as all other events being held at Lincoln Financial Field. Out of four systems installed in our facility, three operate in HD and one is used in a 4K-in/1080-out configuration. While the primary function of DreamCatcher in here is playback during home games, we also use it to log and archive home game footage to our digital asset management system so that it’s available for all of our weekly broadcast and web production needs.
DreamCatcher was a central component in the redesign of our 10 year-old standard-definition control room and has played a key role in the massive improvements we’ve made to our former workflow. We introduced an asset management system in concert with the renovation, and rely heavily on DreamCatcher’s ability to push content quickly to our storage area network with multiple format options during the game. The system’s ability to tag clips with metadata is extremely useful, and the process is easy and fast. Each DreamCatcher has an integrated transcoding engine and a network connection to the Eagles media asset management system. This enables ingame transcoding and file exports directly to the system for postgame editing.
SHARING IS EASY
One of the biggest benefits of DreamCatcher is its I/O and the ability to network all four systems together. All of our DreamCatcher operators can share clips, access playlists and work off of each other’s systems very easily. Any operator on the DreamCatcher network can access and clip any camera angle, allowing editors to quickly add alternate angles of any play to their packages.
We’ve also taken advantage of DreamCatcher’s ability to keyframe zooms, pans and scans within a clip. We find that our replays are much more effective in showing close calls quickly, which is critical for our in-game production. The 4K DreamCatcher system allows us to zoom in on the action and use the play tracker feature to follow specific players or plays being shown on the large stadium displays.
We’ve been using our systems for several months now and choosing DreamCatcher was clearly a great decision. I’m excited to see what features the development team adds as the product continues to evolve.
Eric Long serves as event production manager for the Philadelphia Eagles and is in the midst of his sixth season with that organization. He may be contacted atelong@eagles.nfl.com.
For additional information, contact Evertz at 877-995-3700 or visitwww.evertz.com.
